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Brooklyn to Hollywood: That’s Some Subway Ride

Michael C. Martin on the set of Brooklyns Finest, for which he wrote the screenplay.Credit
Phil Caruso/Overture Films

MICHAEL C. MARTIN sat in the back of a musty soul-food joint in Bushwick, Brooklyn, eyeballing two men in police uniforms who were arguing at a table by the front window. The younger man’s voice was angry and rising, hushed only by the growling of a train clawing its way across the elevated tracks outside.

Mr. Martin watched as the men carried their argument into the street, where it quickly escalated into a fistfight with body slams and bloodied knuckles. Passers-by gathered around the two men, some cheering and pumping their fists. Others who stumbled on the scene looked on in disbelief.

Are those police officers fighting? Wait. Is that who I think it is? Is that Richard Gere?

A member of the film crew rushed over to the massive storefront window, glaring into the street searching for the misguided extra. “He’s someone who will never be in the shot again,” the crewman assured the visibly frustrated Mr. Fuqua, who was rubbing the back of his bald head.

A few seconds later Mr. Gere staggered in from the sidewalk, nursing his elbow as he joined Mr. Fuqua to review tape of the scene. Then before long there was silence, and then “Action!” And again Mr. Gere was in the street, in the middle of the block, tussling with an actor probably half his age.

As strange a scene as it was that day in a neighborhood more accustomed to real-life drama, even more extraordinary is the story of how Mr. Martin, a 28-year-old former subway worker from East New York, Brooklyn, came to write “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a gritty thriller starring Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke and Mr. Gere as police officers in a housing project. Mr. Martin, who in his dusty white FUBU sneakers, denim shorts and a short-sleeve, button-up shirt looked that day more like a college senior than a Hollywood writer, is a onetime film student who remains a few credits shy of his degree from Brooklyn College. His most recent job was subway flagger with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; he waved flags and set up warning lights in subway tunnels to warn approaching trains that construction crews were working on the tracks.

In 2005 a car accident left him injured and his 1991 Lincoln Mark VII totaled. While he would need three months of physical therapy to deal with a bulging disc in his back, his obsession focused less on mending than on making some extra cash to buy a new car. Surfing the Web one day he came across a call for submissions in a screenwriting competition. The grand prize was $10,000. So he began to write the first scenes of what he called “kind of an epic”: the intertweaving stories of three police officers who have misplaced their moral compasses and grown to hate themselves a little along the way.

“I didn’t expect ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’ to get made,” Mr. Martin said. “It wasn’t Hollywood overnight. It was, ‘I’m still working my 9 to 5, and I’m still writing, and I’m still trying to make my dream happen.’ ”

Mr. Martin did not win that contest. He came in second, winning copies of IFP newsletter, which offers articles about the independent film scene. But his script got the attention of a few people in the business. Soon he had an agent and a chance to write an episode of “Sleeper Cell,” the Showtime series, since canceled, about terror cells in America and the agents who track them.

About a year after the contest Mr. Martin’s agent submitted the script to Warner Brothers on spec for a job writing the sequel to the urban cult film “New Jack City.” It landed in a pile of scripts on the desk of the producer Mary Viola. She liked it so much that she not only wanted Mr. Martin to do the “New Jack City” project but proposed that the “Brooklyn’s Finest” script be made into a feature-length movie.

Within weeks the project got the go-ahead. Mr. Martin was paid $200,000 for the script with handsome box-office incentives. After Mr. Fuqua came on board, the big-name cast (Wesley Snipes also stars as a drug dealer recently released from prison) quickly signed on, many taking large pay cuts to work on the film, budgeted at about $25 million.

“I’ve been dealing with making movies for 30 years — more than 30 years, almost 35 years — and I’ve worked with a lot of writers who would try to come up with something like this and would fail,” Mr. Gere said a few days after filming wrapped last month. “It’s got such a wonderful structure to it, besides the innate rhythm and nature of it. The structure was a really terrific movie structure. It’s basically three short stories, very tangentially connected, unexpectedly, contrapuntally working together.”

John Langley, a producer on the movie and the creator of “Cops,” the long-running Fox television show, said Mr. Martin had delivered “the most realistic cop script that I’ve ever read.”

“It’s about inner-city problems, it’s about problems in police departments, it’s about their relationship, it’s about drugs, it’s about society,” Mr. Langley said. “He captures something screenwriters in Hollywood aren’t necessarily going to capture: the smell, the taste, the feel, the reality, the sensibility, the environment, all of these things and the layers that you don’t normally get from people sitting around making up scripts.”

Photo

Michael C. Martin, the writer of Brooklyns Finest, in Los Angeles.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

For Mr. Fuqua, whose last foray into the world of corrupt cops, “Training Day” (2001), garnered a best actor Academy Award for Denzel Washington, “Brooklyn’s Finest” also offered a chance to exorcise a bitter piece of history. Back in 2004, a month before the scheduled start of filming on “American Gangster,” Universal Pictures scrapped Mr. Fuqua’s vision for the movie at a cost of $30 million. The studio, Mr. Fuqua said on the set of this film, wanted something slick and shiny. (At the time Universal cited creative differences for Mr. Fuqua’s departure amid reports of an escalating budget and the lack of a final shooting script. The movie was later filmed with Ridley Scott as director.)

“I wanted to put it in the ’hood and make it as real and gritty as I could make it,” Mr. Fuqua said. A few days after the shoot in Bushwick the crew on “Brooklyn’s Finest” headed back to the Van Dyke housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to capture some of that grit.

The buildings there loom tall, burnt-orange brick and glass jutting from the concrete-covered earth. About 4,410 residents live in the Van Dyke houses’ 23 buildings, all within a few blocks, pressed hard against dozens of other public housing complexes where, like these, hard-working parents and children are stacked on top of one another amid hustlers, whores and killers. Like many of the neighboring communities Brownsville can be a dangerous place where people often still die by the gun, unlike many other parts of Brooklyn.

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On this day in July residents gathered along closed-in courtyards, keeping an eye out for famous faces milling around.

“Hopefully them being here shows people that it ain’t as bad as they think it is out here,” said Franklin Quinones, 26, a resident of the Van Dyke Houses.

This is the world that inspired much of Mr. Martin’s vision of the film. His childhood home, where his mother still lives, is just two subway stops away. He grew up in East New York, “in the best part of a bad neighborhood,” which he loved despite the horror stories. A basketball star until a torn A.C.L. derailed those hoop dreams, he caught the filmmaking bug in a film appreciation class at South Shore High School. “It’s all the great art forms rolled in one,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of it.”

He enrolled in the film department at Brooklyn College. He directed and produced a short movie as a class project, but, he said, he was not able to bear taking the final requirements, like a science class, so he took a gig at the M.T.A. nearly five years after submitting an application. But he did not let go of his moviemaking aspirations — or memories of his formative years.

“The wildest thing, more than anything, is that we shoot in these locations that I’ve been to for years and years, passing by most of my life,” he said. “This movie is really just based on everything I’ve kind of seen throughout my life. It’s not an autobiography, but it’s just those places, the people, the sounds and the look.”

Photo

Antoine Fuqua, the director, on the set with the actor Wesley Snipes.Credit
Phil Caruso/Overture Films

The naysayers said that filming in the area would be trouble. City officials warned that crew members could be assaulted, possibly bricked and bottled, and that they’d be cussed at and unwelcome, Mr. Martin and Mr. Fuqua recalled.

“People say: ‘Aw, man, you can’t shoot there. No one’s ever done it. Can’t go in there,’ ” Mr. Fuqua said. “But it’s been fantastic. The people, the kids running around. A few young guys post up hard, sometimes people would lay on the horn a little longer than you’d like, but still and all they really showed a lot of love.”

Before the shoot ended, Mr. Fuqua donated $100,000 of professional camera equipment to four teenagers he selected for a filmmaking program he created.

“Brownsville, we never get none of this,” said Bryan Martin, 16, one of the participants. “We don’t get nothing, no kind of recognition. And a lot of guys don’t get a chance to get out of the neighborhood, so it’s amazing for them to come to us.”

Mr. Martin credited his Brooklyn upbringing and his years working for the city’s transit authority with giving him a breadth of experiences to use in writing the script.

“You grow up in New York, and you work at a place like the M.T.A., you come across a lot of personalities,” Mr. Martin said. “You get a good understanding of people and their differences and the conflicts they have with each other from where they are and their perspectives on life, religion, politics. It all kind of melts together.”

This is a whole new world for Mr. Martin: the stars, the press, the whirlwind of energy and the anticipation of what could be. But he seemed to be settling into his role as a professional screenwriter. Already he’s begun writing the straight-to-DVD sequel to “New Jack City.” And he and his fiancée, Maria, the parents of a 9-month-old-son, Ricardo, are thinking of moving to California.

Still, some of his family haven’t bought into all the hype, he said.

“My grandmother says the funniest thing,” he said. “She says now that I’m a screenwriter, my handwriting must be getting better. And my mother still thinks that being a paralegal is the greatest job possible. Even when I told my mother they’re going to greenlight the movie, that they’re going to start shooting it, she was like: ‘You know what? I got these brochures about being a paralegal. You should check it out.’

“She comes down to the set, and she still says that.” Mr. Martin laughed. “I think she just wants me to be grounded.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Brooklyn to Hollywood: That’s Some Subway Ride. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe